Over at Daringfireball this past weekend, John Gruber put words to what many people are thinking about after Google's rush of Android announcements and not-subtle Apple-bashing at this week's I/O conference: "all-out war." I agree with Gruber that a good old-fashioned bitter rivalry could be a great thing for the computing world, and for smartphone/handheld fans in particular.

Nokia is definitely on a downward slide and they know it. If not for their history, they'd be the smallest of the niche players. Warm and fuzzy won't work much longer. People want phones that work well. It's obvious that LG and Samsung are chipping away at Nokia on the bottom end and Android and iPhone at the top end.

LG is actually the leader in "smartphones" (flashy stuff with short battery life). It has constantly been selling more "smartphones" than Nokia for years. Nokia isn't going under because Nokia phones is not their core business and they sell more "dumb" phones anyway (those with long battery life that people buy more). They are selling the core technology. They make the network to support the phones and the OS. LG and Samsung add their layer on top of Symbian. Bada looks interesting. I believe the future is all about QT though. Nokia emerged as the leader of the phone industry because they were the first to get that phones are to be sexy, then all followed.
Before anybody come and bash Symbian, let me just tell them they don't know what they are talking about.